Philanthropy Gets in the Ring: Eu - Funders Get Serious about Education Policy: If Education Philanthropists Want to Influence Policy, Then They Must Open Themselves to More Public Debate about Their Plans and Goals

The year 2005 seems like a long time ago. That year, I published a hard look at education philanthropy titled With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy is Reshaping K-12 Education, using the dismal experience of the then recently concluded $1.1 billion Annenberg Challenge as a jumping-off point. At the same time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was walking away from the disappointing results of its enormous investment in small high schools. At that point, Gates foundation officials were, for the first time, seriously considering whether to play an active role in shaping public policy. Race to the Top, the Common Core, Democrats for Education form, and StudentsFirst were unimagined. No one regarded New Orleans, Washington, D.C., or Newark as hotbeds of school reform. Diane Ravitch was still a champion of school choice and accountability, and few had heard of Barack Obama, Michelle Rhee, Deborah Gist, or Geoffrey Canada. No Child Left Behind was still novel and fairly popular, and not a single state was trying to build teacher evaluation around value-added systems. In short, it was a different educational world. And I think it's fair to say that a handful of key philanthropists have been responsible for much of the tectonic shift that we have seen since. A generation of new philanthropists--with names like Gates, Walton, Dell, Broad, Fischer, and Arnold--charged into the K-12 arena in the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Having made billions in technology, energy, retail, and the like, they shared an impatience, an entrepreneurial bent, and a focus on measured outcomes that set them apart from established education givers. Now, let me be straight--I think most of these developments have been good and promising. Obviously, readers are free to disagree. But, whatever one's view, the past seven years offer telling insights about the evolving role of education philanthropy, the promise and the perils of the muscular philanthropy that unapologetically tried to change policy, and how both funders and the rest of us can best navigate the waters ahead. Gifts of the top five funders in 2010 compared to total 2010 U.S. spending on K-12 schooling U.S. spending on K-12 schooling $600 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation $209 million Walton Family Foundation $110 million W.K. Kellogg Foundation $58 million Michael and Susan Dell Foundation $55 million Silicon Valley Community Foundation $35 million Source: The Foundation Center. www.foundationcenter.org A decade ago, a big frustration for edu-philanthropists was the sense that they would invest in exciting programs or practices, but that these never seemed to deliver lasting improvement. A piloted reading or mentoring program would offer promising results, only to disappoint when scaled. Or a foundation would underwrite professional development or a new curriculum for several years, only to see it die on the vine when outside funding dried up. Or funders would help launch dynamic schools, only to see them fall apart when the charismatic founder left. Where an earlier generation of donors had chalked up the challenges to problems of implementation or program design, the new philanthropists were much more receptive to the notion that the problem was the inhospitable cultures, systems, and policy environments in which those scale-ups were being attempted. New donors who had made their fortunes in the new economy frequently staffed their foundations with Teach For America alums, MBAs, or other nontraditional educators and focused on problems posed by system rigidity, leadership, and policy. The new givers gravitated toward a strategy that rested on three key insights, all sketched out in Best Intentions (Hess, 2005): First, University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene's seminal analysis pointed out that the amount of edu-philanthropy is so small that it's ridiculous to think that investments in programs or practice will have a noticeable effect. …

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